


they who made you (they made me, too)

by velvetcrowbars



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: (of sorts), Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Second Person, Spoilers, freaks fall in love too ok
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-05
Updated: 2019-10-05
Packaged: 2020-11-24 17:36:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20911490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/velvetcrowbars/pseuds/velvetcrowbars
Summary: It goes unspoken:am I like you?Or, perhaps the other, more fair favored side of the coin:are you like me?in which Byleth meets Jeritza and learns that often, what you want, is never as simple as you think.





	they who made you (they made me, too)

**Author's Note:**

> title from (and largely inspired by) [fish](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBOU0dafnlA) by wye oak
> 
> well boy howdy here we go!

There’s not much you remember from before you fell.

The world is a crush of darkness, the slabs of the monastery ringing with the sound of a history long buried, of a battle raging overhead. The air smells of spilt blood, the metallic, repulsive scent of it seeping into the dirt.

You open your eyes. You see nothing.

You think, without any sense of urgency, that this may be where you die.

There is a detached idea, dangling in the air: to drag your legs to the exit, to anywhere, crawl until the flesh falls from your bones. Get back to them. It sounds like something Sothis might’ve said – her voice a ringing reprimand from behind the shell of your ear.

But the little goddess is gone. Some small, untamed part of you claws at the walls, begs your arms to lift, to toss away the hurt pulsing in your blood. There’s no point in apologizing now, you know, but the velvety black blocking your sight floods your mouth next, then your nose. You close your eyes. A grip closes around your broken fingers. 

Your last thought, before the yawning grave swallows your body, is of Father teaching you to shoot a bow. His firm grip holding your tense arm steady. A forest damp with winter dew. His voice is the wind in your ears.

_“Lead with your wrist, not your elbow. Don’t lose sight of it. If your target spots you, you’re done for.”_

There is somewhere you should be, but instead you are here: cold and formless and dying. You think of the forest again, of Father’s warmth against your spine. There are fissures forming in the memory, cracking, letting water in. Fingerprints, a row of crescent moon bruises at the base of your throat, starlight hair stuck between your mouths. 

Your father’s voice, again, for the last time in years:

_“As soon as you lose sight of the it, that’s it. You could chase it to the ends of the earth and never find it again. A beast will never come back.”_

…

There’s not much you remember.

_That’s unusual,_ some say. _How fascinating_, whisper others. _What could have caused such a thing?_

You never find yourself questioning the cause until it’s dragged out into the open, all the dirty edges of it exposed under the sunlight washing over the monastery bridge, the dim candles casting through the slates of the library shelves.

Because what could have explained you? You: a dead-hearted thing, a creature made of blood, still warm when it hits the earth. You’d never thought about what it all means, the implication of a body with a head too crowded for laughter, or tears, or smiles given in the garden.

Here is what you do remember: 

…

The monastery is a strange place.

There are many people, saying things you know nothing about. The students hail you over for conversation, praise the way you hold a lance, and puzzle over how there are things you know nothing about. Some lean in closer to catch the way you speak, low and clipped and steady. Others keep a careful distance, polite and helpful. This is how the first few weeks pass – regarding one another with the curiosity a child holds for a beast stalking the edge of the wood. You are not sure who plays which parts, only that there are parts that need playing.

Edelgard looks at you with a knowing, an acknowledgement. You don’t know what it means yet when she tells you, _we may be quite alike, you and I._

Dimitri is kind, eager to please. The hunger he holds in the hollow of his eyes is familiar to you. This is, perhaps, the most dangerous thing of all.

And Claude – Claude smiles around the shape of his laughter, says much, and tells you nothing.

But they aren’t afraid. You suppose that may not be such a terrible thing.

…

“Hey, Professor!”

You don’t stop walking until he blocks your path. You are still unused to your new name. The student, for all his enthusiasm, doesn’t seem to care.

“Have you seen Professor Jeritza around, Professor?”

He is not much shorter than you, his choppy hair a mess on the top of his head, like a bird had pecked and pulled it up like grass. His uniform is very wrinkled. You look at him and remember not his name, but the funny way he grips his axe. It was a form you weren’t familiar with, left hand over right, fingers spread. _Desperation_. You remember.

“Uh…Professor?”

“No,” you say. It rasps with disuse. “I haven’t.”

“Oh, well, I’ve gotta run now, but he’s probably in the training grounds. You should stop by!”

_Caspar_. That’s his name. But you blink once and he’s already walking away, hands tucked behind his head. His smile is too big for his face as he waves a temporary farewell, a call over his shoulder as he disappears around the corner.

“If anyone’s a match for you, it’s him!”

…

Your fellow professors are strange, too.

Hanneman pokes and prods until the soft of your bones ache. The headaches spindling down from the base of your skull linger for days. Manuela does what she can, all her extra flares included. On occasion, she talks until sunset while you lay in a cot soaked in sweat and cold water rags. Most of the time she presses a glassy green vial into your palm, wraps your fingers around it, and says to come back in the morning. The tincture is hot and unbearably spicy, but more often than not, you find sleep that night.

Everyone here calls your father _Captain Jeralt _and _Blade Breaker _but you see him from across the courtyard and still think of the low guardian moon, of how he wrapped you in his coat in winter to carry you on the long walks between jobs, between nowheres. Alois opens his tree trunk arms and calls you _sibling, _but he is a stranger, and when he speaks of your father in the term _greatness _you tuck away into yourself a little more each time. Father pays all of it little mind. So you do, too.

One of the students’ lives in his shadow now – and she eyes you like a loyal hunting dog does a snake curled in the water. You still aren’t sure what to make of that.

It isn’t unlike the way you catch Seteth peering down at you from the high tower balconies. You peer back until he sees fit to retreat back out of sight, and it is comforting, although you’re unsure as to why. 

You are sure watchdogs are comfortable in packs, amongst their own kind. Perhaps that’s the reason. Perhaps there doesn’t need to be a reason at all. 

You like Catherine. She’s loud and good with a blade and isn’t afraid to smack her hand across your back when she loses. Shamir watches from the corner of the training grounds, twirling a knife between the pale flash of her fingers. Catherine’s attempts to coerce her into joining your fights are largely ineffective. You think you like her most of all.

Then there’s Rhea – the reverence with which most everyone says her name lost on you. _Lady_. You don’t think you’ll ever grow used to it, the way a name can be more than just a name. She gives you her complete compassion and benevolent smile, firm in her insistence of your own in return. But your father’s word is the one thing you hold as truth in this world, and even when you give your nod in return, you know better than to think she is satisfied.

_Keep your eyes open_, he’d said. You do. Without question – you always do. 

…

The monastery is a strange place. It is also bigger than you ever imagined.

You wander into the training grounds' courtyard on accident, searching for the scullery to deliver a note. Afternoon is spilling over the eaves, cold sunlight dappling the stone. It’s busy, this time of day. You look for the weapons rack. The note sits forgotten in your pocket.

There are rows of differing makes, different forging methods. A well-stocked version of shops Father would visit, in small Alliance villages, in great Imperial cities. Often, you didn’t go in with him, sitting between the press of the company men’s broad shoulders on the bend of the road, crunching rocks under the thin soles of your one size-too-large shoes.

You look around, the clack of wood on wood an indication, and your hand’s grazing over one of the wooden short swords when a cry comes, a squeal that reverberates between the pillars. The whole courtyard slows to a stop, to turn and stare. To watch. You are no exception.

The student is on the ground, pinned there by his uniform shirt wedged between the dull edge of an iron sword and a new crack in the marbled floor. The length of the sword protrudes, like a cruel, jagged thorn. His opponent stands, lean and red and gray, still and silent. As if he, too, is made of stone.

When you come back to yourself, the training sword is in your hand, and you’re on the downturn of an upswing aimed for the back of his skull.

The blades don’t sing when they clash – metal on wood, oak against iron. It’s a throbbing in the air, something unfurling out of your chest when your eyes meet between the blades’ trembling point of contact.

A soft gray – the color of crushed, melting snow. It is half-hidden, the form of his nose obscured by the mask jutting like canines over his cheekbones.

You swing again, this time a slash aimed for the muscle juncture between neck and shoulder. He blocks it once, twice, three times. You bring your blade down near his knees and he slides, with a scrape of his boots, out of range. You realize your hands are trembling when he steps back in, a challenge accepted when his sword whips past the space beside your ear with a scream of air.

You don’t smile, but your mouth is twisting, teeth gritting, and as you twirl in a dance taught in no ballroom, or kingdom, or empire, you sense the monastery begin to close its walls around you like a tomb, almost like a home. 

…

It goes unspoken: _am I like you?_

Or, perhaps the other, more fair favored side of the coin: _are you like me?_

…

You’d heard the rumors of house Hrym in a tavern, somewhere between childhood and bone-twinging adolescence. It must’ve been raining – you remember shivering in mid-summer, fingers iced, limp and water-logged in your lap. Father pushes a bowl of meaty soup into your hands. You don’t remember what it tastes like.

“Buncha crazy bastards over there,” the woman says, her clawed gauntlets crusted in bloody filth. She pulls the last one off with a grunt. The table shakes with its weight. “Don’t even care if we live or die. Hardly care if we get the job done at all.”

She’s a mercenary captain from Nuvelle. They do this sometimes – exchange information. For money, for small talk. As warnings. You think you’re certain which one this is meant to be.

Father hangs his head. “You’d think they stand to lose the most here. They better be careful.”

You hold your empty bowl, feel the grain of the wood with the blunt end of your nail. You imagine it a sword hilt, long and leathered. The rounded-palm hold of a dagger, or the smooth twang of a bowstring pulled taught. The conversation moves, but you don’t follow it until one of your father’s men drops a hand like a skillet onto your head, ruffling your hair in great, sweeping gusts.

“Well, he can’t be as fierce as our little demon.”

You look up. He’s grinning down at you, one of his lower teeth long-punched out, the rest a row of crooked tombstones in his mouth. He smells of sour blackberry mead. _You’re too drunk, Stefan_, comes a voice, and then there’s a joke and a raucous round of alcohol riddled laughter, and everyone’s eyes turn away from you. The moment passes.

When you look at your father, his small smile is unreadable. Whether it is happy or sad, you do not know. You never quite do.

…

A routine begins to form. 

You spar together when the students are all asleep, when the training ground is empty of its usual latecomers. This is difficult, at times, when the more enthusiastic ones will swing and shoot until their knuckles bruise and blister. You wonder why they act as if there’s a war.

For some, you realize that is what they are afraid of. And for some, the war is already inside them.

But most, if not all, are appeased for a time when you pat the top of their head. They bow, scampering off for dinner, for baths and then bed. You watch to make sure they truly make it out the door. 

When the hush left in the student’s absence falls over you, Jeritza sets aside his whetstone and cloth, tosses you one of the training swords off the rack. You catch the hilt, always, without fail.

You spar.

…

Jeritza fights as if the there is a fire.

Not inside – but burning all around him, in the stone, in the ferns. An invisible flame that scorches pale blue until there’s nothing left, only the impression of words, the vague imitation of emotion. When the sword settles into Jeritza’s grip his face does not change, but the wildness, the frantic fury he carries in his shoulders is an animal, blood-starved and wanting. For what, you cannot begin to guess.

For escape? For freedom? For death? You do not know. You do not ask.

That isn’t something the two of you do: asking, questioning, making conversation. Most of the time, there’s hardly a word exchanged in that traditional, verbal sense. You’ve never been good at that, anyway. You suspect he isn’t either.

It doesn’t matter. There’s never a need for words.

…

You’ve been wondering for weeks now. You decide to ask.

“What is it you want?”

You’re finished for the night, both of you breathing just shy of winded. Jeritza has his back to you, but he turns when you speak. It is the first time you’ve asked him a question.

“Want?” he says, as if unfamiliar with the idea. You nod, because you aren’t sure how to explain.

Silence. Above you, the sky is utterly still and empty. Starless. You almost think he may not answer when Jeritza lifts his face, and then you’re both looking up, searching for any pinpricks of light punching holes in the darkness.

“To live,” he says, eventually. “To live, and then die by your hand. That is my only wish.”

…

Time goes by, where but a scarce word passes between you. You’re busy, and the time you have to spar grows shorter and shorter. The students keep you awake, with questions of their futures you cannot begin to answer. When the Sword of the Creator finds its home in your hands, there is even less you know how to say.

The little goddess grows tired and agitated. You cannot find it in you to feel the same.

It is Jeritza that breaks the truce first. 

“Mercedes.”

You tear your gaze away from the serving of roast on your plate. Jeritza’s food lays near untouched on his own plate resting between the fold of his legs. You’ve never seen him eat before. He must do it while you’re otherwise elsewhere.

Mercedes. It takes you a moment to picture her in full color: to trace in the fluff of her hair and gentle smile, as opposed to the well of magic pouring out of her unmarked palms. She speaks to you with the care someone would take with a child – not patronizing, but careful, considerate. She learns well. You don’t mind that sometimes you must tell her things twice.

“She is–” he trails off. His nose twitches. You wonder if, under the mask, he’s scowling. “Familiar.”

Later, when you pick up your swords again, he strikes at you with a hesitation you’ve never seen before. You’ve no idea where his mind could’ve gone, but you know that it isn’t here. You end up jabbing the flat edge of your blade under his chin. He grips the upper edge of it without wavering, and you wonder if he’d have done the same if the sword were steel and sharpened.

The wood slides through his gloves when you press forward. “You are distracted.”

Your gaze catches on the fold on his mouth as it pinches, pressed to a bloodless line for but an instant before it relaxes once more. The world swings you backwards, wind knocked into your chest that sends you scrambling, dodging across the floor until you skid to a crouch on all fours. He has both of your swords in his hands. Jeritza points the wooden blade beneath your ear, swivels your head to watch the drip of blood slide down your chin.

“I believe–” he says, tossing your sword back within reach, “–that would be my line.”

It was but a split part of a moment - one moment of distraction, and you fold. 

You have no other choice.

…

“You two seem to be getting along well,” your father tacks on, at the end of his report from a skirmish in the eastern edge of the Kingdom. You blink at him, and the horse jostles its bit, attempting to free your grip on the reins.

“Who?” You ask, because you truly wish to know. 

“You and Professor Jeritza, of course.” Under your father’s hand, his horse’s gate is an easy amble, comfortable, hip swaying.

“Oh,” you say. Your own horse is almost prancing. “I guess.”

He laughs. It sounds like gravel, rumbling thunder. “C’mon, kid, don’t be coy with me. I’m happy you’re making friends. The first few weeks you were here had me really worried, you know.”

You look down, drawing thick silvering black mane between the gaps of your fingers. He’d begun teaching your horsemanship at your own insistence, in the rare days he keeps within the monastery walls. You don’t appear to be getting any better at it, despite his proficiency.

“Oh,” you repeat, for lack of anything better. “I’m sorry.”

“That wasn’t me asking for an apology, but okay.” Your father laughs again, softer this time. A puff of silence. “I’m glad you found someone to belong with here. Someone who understands you. That’s all.”

…

You lay in bed, thinking of that word.

_Belonging._ To be a part of something other than yourself. Can a person belong to someone else? No. Your handwriting is shaking strokes in the dark, a quill with white ink. You stare at the curl of your hands on the sheets. Hesitate. Scratch it out. Rewrite.

Can a person belong _with _someone else?

For a blinding second, you think of Jeritza’s level eyes trailing down your body. In the confines of your mind, the little goddess giggles.

…

It’s a time like any other, until you go for the rack of wooden swords. Jeritza taps the ground with a metallic twinge. You turn and he’s holding one of the silver swords, tip just tapping the floor. You look between it and the shadow of his face in the torchlight. The sword rings out once more, and then Jeritza tosses up his grip, extends it, pommel out, in your direction.

Something is different. 

You spar, and everything is the same as it always is, until it isn’t.

He’s hovering, his knees around your thighs. His hair, still secure its tie, falls like a ribbon of ashen gold across his shoulder, almost long enough to tickle your chin. Every bone in your body disconnects, lets you lie under him with the stillness of death. You aren’t touching there, but the air sings, vibrates with the tang of silver on steel.

You catalogue where he does touch: right hand on your left split of ribs, the fingers of his other hand near your neck, holding the hair at your nape to the stone floor. It doesn’t hurt – but the pressure there ensures that it could. 

His hand slides up in a deliberate grasp around your chest, feeling through his gloves, through your three layers of clothes to the unmoving skin underneath. His thumb presses down, tracing a line up the flat plane of your chest, and it doesn’t feel like anything, you hardly count it as a feeling until he finds the dip there – an ugly, gnarled twist of a scar over the center of your heart.

Jeritza stills. He presses harder, carving the deep, jagged line of it with the flat of his thumb. Back and forth, back and forth. 

“I was stabbed,” you say.

“I see that.”

“It was an Almyran blade. They’re made light, so that those not trained in combat may weild them better. It was so fast I didn’t see it coming.”

It’s the most words you’ve strung together in as long as you can remember. Jeritza stares down at his still-moving hand, as if it is not his own. When he looks at you his eyes are a tundra, a dearth, the absence of sunlight. “This should’ve killed you.” 

You realize you’re holding your breath.

“I know,” you say, on the exhale.

He’s still touching it, softer now with understanding. His words are still iron. “Were you not frightened?”

You hesitate, which is an unusual sensation. “Of dying?”

He says nothing. There’s a spark that tingles in your wrist when you lift your arm. The back of your knuckles graze the crest of his cheek first before your fingers flatten, card through the soft fall of his hair. Your own thumb comes to rest just beneath the mask’s edge. You don’t breath, again. Neither of you move.

Your thumb slips up, as if prying an old stone slab long since entombed in the earth. It is an arduous task. Your arm still hurts, numb as it wakes from sleep.

“No,” you answer your own question.

The mask lifts but the width of your finger when Jeritza bears down upon you. His teeth sink into the exposed strip of skin above your collar with a soft sound, the gentle tear of flesh breaking open. The flinch, the way your toes curl, and the shiver that follows, is involuntary. He doesn’t pull away, only runs his lips up your jawline as he moves, breath warm, until he finds your mouth with his own. 

You had never thought of him as a living thing. The thought hadn’t crossed your mind until he’s breathing into you, tasting like cold air and the faint current of your own blood. He inhales and your lungs prickle, a tender ache that sends your hand, still tangled in his hair, gripping tighter. You’ve never done this before, but you’ve always been good at chasing instinct.

You kiss him back.

…

_This is a warning_, he says without words. _This is your last chance. _

_I know,_ you think, as your tongue touches past his teeth like a rush of blood. Like it belongs there, in his mouth. _I know. _

…

“_Finally_,” the voice scratches its way through the armor, obsidian black, the mouthpiece of death itself. You feel the students shrink behind your back, press closer to one another. Closer to you.

“Finally, you have appeared before me.”

Maybe a small part of you is surprised. But the larger, infinitely human-less part you, is not.

…

The monastery is a strange place.

Here, the torches never go out, like a beast refusing to sleep. Ever vigilant. The wind whistles through the gapes in the mountain peaks, like birdsong, like the war cry of an army still far from reach. Sleep is fleeting and restless, if it comes at all. The little god rolls around in your head, complaining in a silent voice of your complacency.

You keep your distance from the training grounds, as if in observance of a sacred rite.

You spend many hours night-walking.

When it’s early, the sun still a broken sliver of blood clinging between the peaks, the stable is busy with preparations for bed. Ingrid hands you scrubbed water buckets for filling, her long arms reaching high for flakes of fresh hay in the lofts, sleeves rolled up and skirt tied to the side. If it’s the other early, morning-time early, Ferdinand is there, and you walk handfuls of the army’s finest mounts down to the fields to graze in the pastured valley beyond the village wall. Marianne’s smile starts, then shies away when you return, chest warm with running. She turns her face away, pale fingers working sticky burrs out of Dorte’s tail.

When it is late, you find the kitchen. Dedue hands you a puff of pastry folded with careful edges, and when you hold its weightless weight in your palm you want to ask _doesn’t it hurt, being here? aren’t you angry? _

But you have never been good with words. You taste the soft, sweet cream dough and it is the best thing you’ve ever eaten.

…

The cathedral is for the midnight candles burning, when the believers have all long since gone.

You like it best when your footsteps echo without interruption, when the only living thing is the sound of the flames guttering in the brass. The main gate closes after sunset, but Flayn had shown you a small door that wound through the wine cellars and up into one of the side courtyards. A small part in her payment of gratitude, for saving her life, she’d said.

She is another oddity. How she mentions flowers wilting in stone, because they know they aren’t supposed to be there. You do not know if she is speaking of you or herself.

You don’t go to the cathedral often, only when the nights are especially endless. Rhea had encouraged you to, but often there is little meaning behind her urging. The marble is empty as the pews, and when you look up at the grand organ pipes, the Goddess perched among its flutes, smiles down at you with eyes of gold. 

…

You remember.

Every hour a little more trickles through, every day, week, passing to month and year. The world crashes against itself without you, and you don’t mind it. At first, you don’t mind the memory of your father’s dying words, of the tears you shed into the bloodied hole he’d left in the foundation of your earth. Life plays out behind your eyes, swollen shut with time, with old scar tissue. 

A lurch comes, a rock scraping a ship in the middle of an open sea. It floods over everything else, and then you’re in the training grounds again, weight leaned against a pillar, throat sore and muscles tense.

“_It would be a shame_.” Jeritza skimmed his thumb over your lower lip. “_If you were to die before I could kill you, too_.”

The grip around your fingers tugs, weak but persistent.

You open your eyes, and the clouds break over your vision in a hundred pools of white light. Water floats around your feet but your clothes are dry, warmed under the friction of your sleeping skin. You sit up. The villager at your side draws away, as if he’s just seen a wolf crawl from a rabbit hole. You stand up, eyes turning north, jagged remains of broken stone like a tower where the monastery once stood. It matters not, you realize, as you take your first, unsteady steps.

You have a promise to keep.

**Author's Note:**

> started another fic in my car again and wrote this in less than 48 hours. sometimes u have to be the clown you want to see in the world
> 
> i'm on [tweeter](https://twitter.com/snipmoonn) if u are also having a bad time in Fire Emblem: Three Houses (2019) and need to scream. i know i sure do


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